Markus,
I couldn't agree more with your comments. I've been bemused by the quite
detailed discussions without much input at a high level. So....my 2p worth:
Email is A Bad Thing.
Just because it is ubiquitous doesn't make it worthwhile. I think that
currently email can be divided into 3 kinds:
1) Personal email - I don't have official figures but I expect >95% of all
emails are personal. This email is personal even though I am using my
company's infrastructure to send it.
2) Organisational email - just occasionally I send an email that says "I'll
meet you in London at 9.00am for a very important meeting". This is my idea
of an organisational message, sent in my role as an employee.
3) Contractual email - maybe, once upon a time, somewhere, someone sent an
email saying "I'll buy 500 of your widgets and here's my credit card
details" - I've not met this person.
So, given the above, we should concentrate on getting point 1) right. This
means that issues such as authenticity and authorisation are lesser against
user-friendliness.
Point 3) is already lost since web based solutions are used for contractual
agreements. Indeed, I would suggest that a centralised solution is a better
option for Mail NG generally. It is better (both for security and bandwidth
reasons) to bring the people to the information rather than sending multiple
copies of the information to the people.
regards,
Piers
-----Original Message-----
From: Markus Stumpf [mailto:maex-lists-email-mailng(_at_)Space(_dot_)Net]
Sent: 23 February 2004 15:29
To: mail-ng(_at_)mail(_dot_)imc(_dot_)org
Subject: visions
Over the weekend I have read about 250 of the about 500 emails that
arrived via this list during the last 2 weeks (killed some threads like
XML after a while ;-)
What I am really missing in this whole discussion are visions.
Don't/didn't you read/watch SciFi books/films?
Keith's list about what users want is really a good start.
But now we have the chance to design something completely new and
all I have read so far is more or less close to things we now already
have. People are talking about mail headers and servers and stuff.
Should a discussion not start at a more generic point? Maybe at a point
"what is email?" and "do we need something - like we now understand email
-
any more?".
While reading the messages and Keith's summary two things came into
my mind:
- Document Management Systems
and a defintion for DNS by Kevin Darcy:
- It's a distributed, hierarchical, replicatable database with caching,
referral and aliasing capabilities, containing mostly network-related
information, such as name-to-address and address-to-name mappings,
and which is usually accessed by clients in a simple query-response
manner.
Combining the two and adding authentication and authorization would make
IMHO a good start for a new "email system". Documents could be stored in
a document server and would be replicated (on demand) and mapped to user
document space. Maybe backlinks and kind of link counts would be nice.
Each "message" or "document" would have a URI (it should have a unique
message-id already, right?) and there would be a mapping to URLs which
would point to source/replica servers or only to a user private document
space (but I'm getting to concrete).
Also IMHO it is very important to have an overview of how traditional
email
is used today and would be used in the future.
While a few years ago text/plain was THE encoding to send emails a lot
of companies start switching to text/html as the layout provides more
possibilities to make "official email" look like a written letter, with
logos and a letter head. Maybe in three or four years they like to send
MP3s or MPEGs, so IMHO discussions about ASCII/UTF-8 or whatever are
pretty
useless and BINARY is the way to go ;-)
Email had a strong move towards a file/document transfer protocol the last
years and the big advantage over FTP/HTTP is that it is asynchronous (for
the
sender and recipient) and that it is push and not pull. Sending a use
the information right to his box has a higher acceptance than sending
the user an URL and have him retrieve the information himself.
\Maex
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